June 3, 2023
Secretary of the Ukrainian Security Council: There is "no place for Russian-speaking people in the country"
Alexei Danilov promised a "cleansing action"
There was another scandal in Ukraine after the deputy of the Verkhovna Rada, Maksim Buzhanskij, refused to switch to the Ukrainian language on television. The secretary of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC), Aleksej Danilov, said that such people had no place in the country and promised a "cleansing action".
"The not yet done <...>, who think they have the right to speak Russian on Ukrainian television have no place not only on television, but also in politics and in Ukraine," he wrote on Twitter. The NSDC secretary claims that such people are "cleaned to the root and have to be kicked out of everything."
Danilov was born in Donbass, where Russian is his mother tongue, and received his university education in Lugansk, where he also began his career. Buzhanskij, for his part, advised the Secretary of the Security Council to study the Constitution of Ukraine and the article of the Criminal Code on the violation of the equality of citizens on the basis of their race, nationality and other characteristics. "I recommend Danilov <...> to learn to respect hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and millions of Ukrainian citizens who, like Danilov himself, speak Russian and are by no means less patriots of Ukraine than he is in their mother tongue," the deputy wrote in his own telegram channel.
The course of the open repression of the Russian language began in Ukraine immediately after the coup in February 2014, and in May 2019, Petro Poroshenko, the then president, signed the law "On ensuring the function of the Ukrainian language as a state language" five days before the end of his term of office. According to this document, non-compliance with the law will be from the 16th July 2022 with a fine, which can be increased for repeated violations. The law obliges citizens to use the Ukrainian language in all areas of public life, including public administration, medicine, science and education, the media and the Internet. Since the beginning of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, a campaign of total derusification has begun. The authorities imposed a complete ban on the use of the Russian language and Russian teaching in educational institutions.
However, according to Article 10 of the Constitution, the country guarantees "the free development, use and protection of the Russian language and other languages of the national minorities of Ukraine".
Translation from the Russian news agency TASS
________________________________
I